September 2017

Most seem to agree at this point that the Cannes Film Festival’s competition line-up was not good this year. While the New York Film Festival’s main slate includes more than a few of the same selections, the films that didn’t make the cut are especially noteworthy: Michael Haneke’s cynical, typically mean-spirited career rehash Happy End; Sergei Loznitsa’s miserablist slog through Russian bureaucracy, A Gentle Creature; Michel Hazanavicius’s insulting Jean-Luc Godard biopic Redoubtable; and Fatih Akin’s flat-out offensive jihadist commentary-cum-revenge flick, In the Fade.…

For our third and final dispatch from the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s number one, here’s number two), we take a look at the film that caused(?) bomb threats at its Cannes premiere this year: Michel Hazanavicius’s nose-thumbing Jean-Luc Godard “biopic.” This dispatch also…

Our second dispatch from the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival (you can find the first here; the third and final one will be up on Friday) includes a new collaborative film from a French New Wave legend; a domestic drama that’s much closer to a horror…

The fall film festival season is already in full swing, but the Toronto International Film Festival stands out due to its emphasis on commercialism, and its popularity with the general public. In fact, with each successive year (we’ve been attending since the mid-2000s), TIFF seems to increase its…

It’s difficult to argue that Darren Aronofsky’s films are poorly executed, at least on a formal level; his largely allegorical works are often manic, intense, portentous, and meticulously designed, it’s just that they’re also so sophomorically pleased with themselves, rarely approaching their allegories from a perspective…

We have a lot planned for the fall film festival season—including multiple dispatches from the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. But first, a modest precursor spotlighting five noteworthy titles that screened during the season’s initial Big Film Fest. Our sampling of the 2017 Venice International…